You hear often that we “live in a global world now.” You hear that “globalization” means we have to drop our wages and standards to match those in impoverished, Third-World countries. You hear that the “cost” of controlling pollution makes us uncompetitive in the world. Etc. Etc. Etc. It’s inevitable – a force of nature – so don’t fight it, they say. This is endlessly repeated as if we weren’t in a “global” world when the first camel crossed a border or the first sailing ship crossed a sea. But since that first camel countries have enacted policies to make things better for their people.

Sunday’s New York Times published an op-ed, “The Myth of Industrial Rebound,” by Steven Rattner, one more wealthy Wall Street executive who revolved through the door from being an Obama administration official after he revolved through the door from being a Wall Street executive. In his op-ed Rattner accurately describes many of our economy’s problems but concludes that we should let these things just happen to us because, “In a flattened world, there will always be another China.”

Rattner points out that many of the new manufacturing jobs are low-wage. “This disturbing trend is particularly pronounced in the automobile industry. When Volkswagen opened a plant in Chattanooga … the beginning wage for assembly line workers was $14.50 per hour, about half of what traditional, unionized workers employed by General Motors or Ford received.” Meanwhile, “in Germany, the average autoworker earns $67 per hour. … Volkswagen has moved production from a high-wage country (Germany) to a low-wage country (the United States).”

Rattner is correct that falling wages are slowing economic recovery. “These dispiriting wage trends are a central reason for the slow economic recovery; without sustained income growth, consumers can’t spend.”

We know for a fact it had nothing to do with “WMD.” We went through this huge sell-job, the “run-up.” The whole country was whipped into a terrified frenzy. Do you remember being told we would be attacked with smallpox, and all the news stories about what smallpox can do to a person, does Iraq have it, how will they spread it, etc?

For that matter, why did we get into the Vietnam war? No one ever answered that one, either.

If we had self-government maybe people could get our Congress to investigate these things…

In her first year in office, Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno opened a frontal attack on an unlikely target, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Its contracting was “inexcusably” flawed, she said. Its practices were “unethical” and too cozy. Its director had to go.

Like Joe McCarthy, they needed a target.

In spring 2011, she began a new offensive. She went before legislative committees and pilloried a man doing work on an Arts Council contract, building a 9/11 timeline at Liberty State Park in Jersey City. His contract was no-bid, she said, the money unclear.

6. Myth: The minimum wage fight is “the latest distraction from Obamacare.”
According to many conservatives like those at website Redstate, “Democrats are turning to their age old panic button – demagoguery over the minimum wage.” OK, busted. This is, of course, the real truth. The conservatives have exposed that the real reason that so many people currently forced to live in poverty are pushing for an increase in the minimum wage is to distract the public from Obamacare.

Billionaires running ads to try to persuade young people not to get health insurance is one thing. Besides being just weird, that’s just sabotage. The right’s undercutting the President’s foreign policy and love of Putin is something else.

Republicans smell an election opportunity – but only if they can keep the economy down, jobs down and wages down. Most recently to keep people and the economy miserable they filibustered long-term unemployment assistance, and are working to cut back from the meager 26 weeks of assistance the states offer.

The New York Times explains in “States Cutting Weeks of Aid to the Jobless,” “[L]ast July, North Carolina sharply cut its unemployment program, reducing the maximum number of weeks of benefits to 20 from 73 and reducing the maximum weekly benefit as well.”

When North Carolina did this, a huge number of people just gave up looking for work and disappeared from the workforce. This made it look like the unemployment rate went down because only people who are actively looking are counted in the statistics. But what actually occurred was an increased need for food stamps and other aid. This, of course, doesn’t save the government money because, instead of paying unemployment, they are paying for this assistance.

As Republicans explain it, their idea is that people getting unemployment assistance are too “comfortable.” So the have to force these lazy, comfortable people into conditions that are so bad they will take any nasty, low-wage, humiliating, dangerous job. Of course, this means they will work for even less than the people who are already in such jobs. Meanwhile, the reality is that there is only one job for every three people looking for work.

Here is the thing: Obviously cutting this assistance drags down the surrounding economy as even more people can’t pay their mortgage or rent or buy shoes, gas, clothes of even enough food. So local stores have to cut back, causing even more unemployment. Billions are taken out of the economy, things get worse… And now more “red” states are working on doing the same thing.

The Bet Is That The Public Will Blame Democrats

Republicans are betting that voters will blame the “party in power,” which means the party of the president. Our corporate media is complicit in this strategy. If Americans found out that it is Republican filibusters in the Senate and obstruction in the House that keeps bills from even getting a vote that is holding back the economy, they would know who to blame. The media works to keep that a secret.

A federal program supplying extra weeks of benefits to the long-term unemployed expired at the end of 2013, and congressional Democrats failed in an effort to revive it.

Right, It was Democrats who “failed to revive it.” This surely tells voters to hold Democrats responsible for the cutoff of long-term unemployment assistance. With media reports like this, Republicans will win their bet.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Tuesday used a private meeting with House Republicans to tout polling that suggests that voters now blame President Obama more than former President George W. Bush for the state of the economy.

. . . Republicans, he argued, now have the upper hand when it comes to the economy.

. . . After Obama’s 2012 reelection, according to Winston’s polling, 53 percent of voters said “policies of the past” were causing the nation’s economic problems, while 44 percent blamed policies “of the present.” Polling in November 2013 found those numbers largely reversed; 41 percent blame the policies of the past, while 49 percent blame current policies.

Conservative wonks and Republican lawmakers are coalescing around a new strategy to sabotage Obamacare by repealing a temporary piece of the law designed to hold down premiums in the event of major market disruptions.

. . . The conservatives are open about the end goal: collapse Obamacare by causing higher premiums on the law’s marketplaces for the newly insured, which progressive experts who support Obamacare agree would occur if the provision is scrapped.

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers’ compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as “free-market thinktanks”, includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

Here’s the strategy: Sabotage things, wait as corporate media doesn’t inform the public who is filibustering and obstructing, let conservative propaganda outlets tell the public to blame Democrats for the terrible suffering and economic catastrophe that result. Over time people really don’t have much choice except to blame the people who the radio and TV and FOX News and all the other outlets tell them to blame: Obama and the Democrats.

Unemployment benefits make people’s lives better and buoy a fragile, but possibly accelerating recovery. Some Republicans are apparently reluctant to give the economy, and by extension the Democrats, a shot in the arm right now.

If this ideologically driven objective of deeply cutting spending is met, this will represent just one more way that the GOP Congress has managed to delay full recovery from the Great Recession. The evidence continues to pile up that these spending cuts, forced on a still-depressed economy, can easily throw the nation back into an outright recession and prolong the nation’s economic misery.

Is this an overly harsh read on the motivations of GOP members of Congress? Not at all. Motivations aside—regardless of whether they deeply believe that their ideological goal of reducing government spending will help the economy or whether they think that a slowed economy will simply help their own electoral prospects—the facts are simply that congressional Republicans have consistently hamstrung efforts that a large consensus of economists agree would have provided crucial help in lowering American unemployment.

[. . .] Conclusion

Concern that the GOP Members of Congress have a vested interest in slowing economic recovery has been brewing for quite some time. Speaking at Cuyahoga Community College ahead of the election, former President Bill Clinton accused congressional Republicans of deliberately trying to keep the unemployment rate elevated for political gain.

It’s a theory that progressives have grown sympathetic to as Republicans make it ever-more difficult for President Obama to govern and thwart initiatives in Congress to stimulate the economy. Democratic operatives have loosely floated the claim in broad ways by suggesting the GOP is hoping for economic failure, but Reid’s pointed accusation took it to a new level.

But these are not the outlets that reach the broad majority of Americans. Will the Republican strategy of economic sabotage win them the House, Senate and maybe even the presidency? If it does succeed, what does this mean for the future of our economy and our country?

Today’s ridiculous attack on teacher unions is one that accuses them of supporting sexual predators in schools. Let’s see if we can figure out what’s behind it.

In a Wall Street Journal hit-piece, Campbell Brown – you may remember her as a former television news personality – accuses teacher unions of trying to block a bill to keep sexual predators out of schools. In the op-ed “Keeping Sex Predators Out of Schoolrooms,” subtitled “Congress is considering better background checks for teachers. Why won’t unions support the bill?” Brown describes the bill and asks, “These are sensible measures that are overdue. Yet the two most powerful teachers unions in the country have voiced objections to the bill.”

Of course, the objections that teacher unions have voiced are not objections to protecting kids against sexual predators. The teacher unions want to strengthen the bill, not stop it. (See the full letter to Congress from American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten here.) But no matter; the bill is a set-up. While it is about stopping “sexual predators,” it is used here as a honey-trap to elicit objections that can be used against unions. Then ANY objection to a bill that supposedly is about stopping sexual predators is described as an effort to help sexual predators. This is one of the oldest propaganda techniques in the book.

Guess who is one of the biggest employers of minimum-wage employees? Your own federal government. After years of “privatization” and outsourcing, the government now contracts out a lot of work to companies that pay really, really low wages for jobs that when they were “government jobs” used to provide good pay and benefits. And this means that a lot of people – between 1 and 2 million – have to live in poverty. Now there are reports that President Obama is considering doing something about that.

Recent studies have shown how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts, grants, loans, concessions and property leases currently flow to companies that pay low wages and provide few if any benefits, even as executive pay among federal contractors has risen. In effect, tax dollars are being used to fuel the low-wage economy and, in the process, worsen inequality.

On the 50th anniversary of the war on poverty, Republicans are whipping out “compassionate conservatism” again, in an attempt to rebrand themselves as something other than the harsh, anti-poor, anti-women, anti-minority, anti-gay, anti-everything wingnuts they have been showing us they are. It’s a strategy Republicans default to when they’ve taken things to such an extreme that the country is revolted. And here we are with Republicans pretending to have proposals geared toward fighting poverty instead of just boosting the fortunes of those who already have huge fortunes.

I was on “The Nicole Sandler Show” recently talking about the one-sided trade agreements we’ve been tricked into and the damage they do to the economy. It’s also quite entertaining. Seriously, it is. Bad puns, jokes and, of course, Nicole!!

On the show I talk about what the 2012 $540 billion trade deficit means. “Imagine if factories in America got orders for $540 billion of goods… the economy would be booming. … that was just one year of our trade deficit.”